While on school holidays, a 12-year-old boy from London who is behind the creation of pixelated art pieces called Weird Whales has gained a whopping 290,000 after selling them as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs allow artworks to be “tokenized” to generate a digital certificate that proves ownership. This certificate can be credited and sold.
The buyer is not given the real artwork or its copyright with the NFT.
The boy, Benyamin Ahmed, shelved his money in the form of crypto-currency called Ethereum in which his works were sold.
With this, the value of his earnings can go up and down. It also does not come with a backup from the authorities in case the digital wallet gets hacked.
Benyamin was known among his classmates to have YouTube videos featuring his hobbies but they have no idea about his riches in crypto.
“My advice to other children that maybe want to get into this space is don’t force yourself to do coding, maybe because you get peer pressured – just as if you like cooking, do cooking, if you like dancing, do dances, just do it to the best of your ability,” he said.
A son of a software developer, Imran, Benyamin and his brother Yousef, were influenced by their father to begin coding when they were young.
They enjoy the perks of having a firm circle of technology pros to ask for advice when they need them.
“It was a little bit of a fun exercise – but I picked up really early that they were really receptive to it and they were really good,” Imran said, as reported by BBC.
“So then we started getting a little bit more serious – and now it’s every single day… but you can’t cram this stuff, you can’t say I’m going to learn coding in three months,” he said, saying his kids allot 20 to 30 minutes of their day to code.
